Excel Data Model Management

Many banking and financial services institutions have tens of thousands of Excel Models created by Subject Matter Experts (SME) in areas including actuarial, ratings, financial instruments, or tax.

These models are used by business teams to conduct their day to day activities as they sell products, upgrades, renewals, and create information products and reflect the intellectual property of these companies ultimately having a significant impact on the top line revenue.

These business activities create thousands of workbooks every year that are not managed by IT and are disconnected from the enterprise systems. There is no control over these workbooks by SME teams and IT. This creates the following critical challenges in the enterprise.

Excel Data Model Management Challenges

Data Management/Sych

As subject matter experts update these models with better risk analysis, more optimal calculations, or to reflect new business requirements they find that they have no methods to propagate these updates to the thousands of workbooks created by the business

No Collaborative Capabilities

There is no method for teams to collaborate on the data as these are files stored in document management systems and suffer from issues such as data and worksheet level access control, workflow serialization, change management, and multiple file versions resulting in Excel chaos

Not Integrated

There is no method to connect these workbooks to enterprise systems for the purposes of business workflow or for reporting. This results in slow and painstaking manual movement of data from Excel to other systems and vice versa

Boardwalk Data Model Management (DMM) Platform

Until now, the process of converting these Excel workbooks to web-based applications has been extremely time and cost prohibitive. An unsolved problem in the Excel data management world has been how to create a multi-dimensional information package around an Excel Cell value that is transportable across the enterprise along with the cell. Boardwalk DMM solves this problem.

Cell Exchange Protocol

Boardwalk DMM uses key enterprise attributes - our Cell Exchange Protocol - that can be fully described by six types of dimensions which allows you to work with any ad-hoc unstructured Excel model.

Transportable Across the Enterprise

Once the cells are tagged using the six dimensions, these cells become transportable across the enterprise. This is fundamentally unique to Boardwalk DMM as this is not possible with any Excel cell today.

Integration/Aggregation

Once the cells are tagged, these cells can be queried or updated by external systems and it can be queried across multiple workbooks using a cell query.

The Boardwalk DMM is a single information repository that brings together the subject matter experts, business executives, partners and enterprise systems to create an extremely powerful system for banking and financial services institutions

Benefits of using Boardwalk for Excel DMM

Improve Critical Processes

Take your pricing and underwriting effectiveness, renewal retention, actuarial product quality, and portfolio reporting to a new level

A Complete View of All Models

An on-demand view of data across all Excel models is available at an enterprise level for analysis, reporting, compliance, risk, and ML/AI

Risk Mitigation

Preparer / reviewer / approver workflows and a granular audit trail for each transaction across its entire lifecycle means better process risk mitigation

Excel Data Model Management